On Excelsior there are the remains of an old paddock – it was almost intact, still, when I first saw it years ago but since then a few of the fence posts have fallen of their own volition, perhaps helped along by cattle looking for new ways to scratch their backs, and...

Let’s hear it for our heavy equipment operators, who perhaps have left their mark on our shared landscape more than any architect or landscape architect or designer or engineer. These drivers of massive machinery are capable of filling wetlands, redirecting...

Looking out on our ever-unfinished landscape, I reflect briefly on how little my wife and I have managed to accomplish, in the decades we’ve lived on our land. We’ve built a house and done a little tree-clearing, where the crowded oaks were clearly overgrown and...

What is the ideal parcel size? This is a question we ask ourselves frequently, particularly out here in Nevada County where large ranches are continually being subdivided for suburban émigrés. At their worst, these “rurban” subdivisions can inflict the same...

Where do you really want to put that perfect view? It’s why you bought your property, isn’t it? And it might even be what makes your property more valuable than the properties on either side of you. So why wouldn’t you want to put your house right on top of that...

One of the first things we do moving onto a new and undeveloped piece of land, is to start considering driveways and roads. We need to access the land, after all, whether to log, or build our structures, or even to survey the property. We need to be able to use the land, and so one of the first questions we ask ourselves (or simply ask the heavy equipment operator) is, where should the road go?